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Just who do you think you are?

Just who do you think you are?

Last updated on: September 14, 2026 at 4:27 pm by Fred Clark

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Just who do you think you are? 2026-09-14T16:27:08-04:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

OK, so we’ve talked a bit about how 1 Corinthians 13 — the famous “love” chapter we read at weddings — is an argument about epistemology and uncertainty and the limits of human perception and cognition.

We mortal humans cannot be sure of anything, Paul says. We might expect the Apostle Paul — who can sometimes seem like a stern moralist and a scold — to blame this human uncertainty on sin and sinfulness, but he doesn’t do that. It’s just the human condition due to our basic human limits. We are not omniscient, or omnipresent, and our senses and perceptions are never 100% trustworthy.

And so, Paul says, we should cling to the one thing we can be sure about: love. We will never have access to perfect knowledge or perfect revelation, and even if we did, we would be unable to perceive it perfectly. So love is the only perfection within our grasp and we should grab it tight and hold on.

This is also what Paul is talking about elsewhere when he says, “Test everything; hold on to the good.” How can we know what is “the good”? Because the greatest is love.

We can think of that verse — 1 Thessalonians 5:21 — in X-Files terms: “Trust no one,” but, also, “the truth is out there.”

Understanding that 1 Corinthians 13 is a treatise on epistemology shouldn’t ruin it as a lovely text to read at weddings. The epistemological humility Paul insists we’re all stuck with there is also a very good thing for newlyweds to bear in mind. That’s every bit as practical as all the stuff about patience, and not being self-seeking, and not being easily angered.

Another very famous and beloved passage in the New Testament is also, among other things, an argument about epistemology. This is the story of Jesus and Nicodemus. from the third chapter of John’s Gospel — the story that gives us John 3:16.

That verse and that story are so familiar that we can read it without seeing anything except for what we already expect to see.

And thus we can easily miss the whole thread of this didactic dialogue* that is about exactly that — about our inability to see anything other than what we already expect to see. “No one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”

The word translated there as “see” is the Greek idein,** which has to do with sight and perception. It is, you’ll notice, related to English words we still use, like “idea” and “ideology.”

The author of John, like Paul, argues that we mortal humans are not fully able to “see” — to perceive, to know. But, unlike Paul, the author of John suggests that this has to do with our sinfulness: “Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.”

But that willful wickedness is downstream from what Jesus suggests earlier in this dialogue about the need to be “born again.” That’s the starting point — that we cannot “see” or know because of who we are, or because of who we have chosen to be. Our evil deeds reinforce that initial inability to see, compounding incomprehension with deliberate refusal, but the initial problem is a problem regardless of such wickedness or willful stubbornness.

Our identity prevents us from seeing and from knowing. So if we want to become able to see and to know, we first need to change who we are — to let go of that identity and take on a new one.

That’s a tall order. It is, as “Nicodemus” rightly points out in this dialogue, a radically impossible-sounding proposition.

But here is political scientist Samuel Bagg sounding very much like John 3:3, ” When you’re talking about changing people’s identities, I think you’re absolutely right to identify the need for there to be these powerful experiences akin to something like going through basic training or a religious conversion experience.”

That, again, is from Bagg’s conversation with the (excellent) climate journalist David Roberts: “The cure for misinformation is not more information or smarter news consumers.”

I said recently that I wanted to engage with that conversation more fully after first clearing my throat with a mini-sermon on 1 Corinthians 13. It turns out that I also needed to clear my throat with a second mini-sermon on John 3.

Roberts and Bagg are “talking about changing people’s identities” because identity and “social identity” are at the heart of that entire conversation. What we think we know, and what we are able to know, is based on who we think we are.

More information, more evidence, more reason or logic or argument, is of no use when identity is at stake. Additional information or evidence will be invisible and imperceptible unless it challenges that identity, but any challenge to identity will be perceived as an existential threat to the core of one’s existence. (“Unless a seed falls to the ground and dies …”)

Their conversation on politics and social identity(-ties) circles around this central dilemma, sometimes hopefully and sometimes in near despair about the scope of the problem. When we finally do get into all that a bit more, I want to focus on the hopeful bits.

But here, again, I just wanted to note that none of this is new. Dr. Bagg may be drawing on the most recent research from fields like “social psychology,” but all of that 21st-century research only confirms what we humans already understood about ourselves back in the first century. All of us see through a glass, darkly.

* One question it’s helpful to ask about any biblical passage is “Who is telling this story?”

The Gospels are full of stories about Jesus’s public ministry and about the things he taught to his disciples. Those stories and sayings were witnessed and what we have in the Gospels might well be based on the accounts from those witnesses.

But we don’t have any such witnesses here for this story in John 3. The only people present are Jesus and Nicodemus, and this account of the story is not told as though it were being recounted by either of them. Instead we have an apparently omniscient third-person narrator. So who is that? Who is telling this story?

The temperamentally “conservative” answer is to guess that Nicodemus must have later shared his account of this with the author of John, or with someone else who then shared it with that author who wrote it up second-hand. I’d simply suggest, instead, that this story was written by the same author who wrote that semi-Platonic preamble in John chapter 1 — all that stuff about Logos and pre-existent eternal truths. That guy read a lot of Plato. And anybody who’d read that much Plato was surely fond of Plato’s genre of dialogue, so I suspect that is what we have here. I don’t think John 3 is presented as a transcript of an actual conversation but as a lesson constructed in the form of a dialogue.

Was there “really” a Nicodemus who met with Jesus on the rooftop? Sure, maybe. But that’s not the main point here.

** I do not speak, read, write, or understand Greek. Not biblical Greek, not Ancient Greek, not modern Greek. My seminary classmates on the pastoral track were required to take two semesters of Greek, but I was not and so I did not.

This was a practical choice. I was working in the basement of that seminary, a short walk from the seminary library and, even more significantly, just a few floors down from the offices of several renowned biblical scholars — professors and professionals with decades of immersion and experience and expertise in biblical languages.

Two semesters of Greek might have provided me with a fumbling, introductory, semi-reliable, partial “knowledge” of Greek. Why work so hard to settle for that when such a wealth of deeper expertise was so close at hand?

I did not try to learn Greek because “we” already know Greek — because I have chosen to be (or have by good fortune or providence found myself to be) a part of a “we” that includes those who already know Greek extremely well. I trust and defer to the expertise of others on biblical Greek. They know it for me and so I did not need to learn it “for myself.”

Is it possible that this trust is misplaced? Possible, yes. But it’s less likely because the scholars I have chosen to trust are themselves part of a larger community of scholarship that has endured and proved itself reliable over the course of generations. If I were to choose to distrust all of that and “do my own research,” I would need to commit to decades of individual, independent scholarship — based on what? — and then to value my own personal work as deeper and more reliable than all of theirs combined. That would be an incredibly arrogant approach but, even more importantly, an incredibly time-consuming one. Even if I were arrogant enough to imagine myself as smarter and more perceptive than the cumulative work of every scholar in that generations-long community of scholarship, it would still be laughably foolish to undertake such an endeavor as a mortal with only 24 hours per day and the same human lifespan as everyone else.

Imagining you’re smarter than everyone else is always incredibly dumb. Imagining you have infinite time to learn everything is utter foolishness.

No one can know everything. We have neither the capacity nor the time for that. And so all of us need to trust others to know things on our behalf. I did not study Greek for the same reason that I did not enroll in medical school when I learned that my wife would require surgery.

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